Two Ukrainian askaris peer into a doorway past the bodies of Jews killed during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The original German caption reads: “Ukrainian askaris used during the operation”. During WWII, the Germans used the term “aska…
By September 1942, a brutal hand-to-hand battle was being waged inside Stalingrad. As they fought from house to house and street to street, the Germans found that all of the tactical advantages they had possessed in fighting across the steppes were lost in…
The cheerful German soldiers in the trenches filled the autumn rains spread the food for their comrades. Water is pumped out of the trench using a mechanical pump. Photo taken during Battle for Velikiye Luki, October 1943. With the advent of mechanized …
A German World War II prisoner is released by the Soviet Union and reunited with his 12-year-old daughter, who has not seen him since infancy. The child has not seen her father since she was one year old. The event, where this famous photo was taken, wa…
These photos were taken between May and December 1944, and they show the officers and guards of Auschwitz relaxing and enjoying themselves — as countless people were being murdered and cremated at the nearby death camp. In some of the photos, SS officers c…
Vlasik’s off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide. This photo shows how human this “monster” was, like Hitler with his…
After the German 2nd Panzer Division captured Athens, they raised the Nazi German flag above the Acropolis as a sign of victory. This flag, the symbol of Greece's occupation, would be taken down one month later in one of the first acts of the Greek Resi…
In the summer of 1944 the Soviet Union launched Operation Bagration, a large-scale, complex offensive against the Nazi invaders in Belarus, Poland and the Baltic republics. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in …
At 1:10 a.m. on May 9, 1945, night owls in the USSR heard a radio report that Nazi Germany had officially surrendered to the Soviet Union. Up to 30 million soldiers and civilians were dead, the Soviet Union had lost a third of its national wealth, citie…
This last known picture of Hitler was taken approximately two days prior to his death as he stands outside his Berlin bunker entrance surveying the devastating bomb damage. With Germany lying in ruins after six years of war, and with defeat imminent, Hitle…
On the reverse of this photograph reads: "Zum ewigen Andenken an den Spartakisten Krieg in München Bayern". English: “As an eternal memento of the Spartacist War in Munich, Bavaria”. According to some sources, this is a real situation, other sources cla…
A sixteen-year-old German anti-aircraft soldier of the Hitler Youth, Hans-Georg Henke, taken prisoner in the state of Hessen, Germany. He was a member of the Luftwaffe anti-air squad who burst into tears as his world crumbled around him. His father died…
The facility is the Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt Hermann Goering. It was located in Volkenrode, a suburb of Braunschweig and it was the most advanced wind tunnel test facility in the world at the time, though they were never able to fully calibrate most of t…